Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

1

Some words, in Gaelic say, or Welsh, or English, are haunted by silent sounds and clustered consonants

           - like the personality is house to some constituents like love, and certain qualities of hope, we say, that “never die” -

           they are hungry ghosts, with double attributes - these characters that walk around inside us, things from the past that we haven’t completely dealt with yet, the history of our language, and the needs that continue to move us.

           We need forever to know these things and to hear them clearly, even though they are unpronounced.

2

(The Value)

Sometimes I’m reminded of a disused factory shell in Dudley, the early 1970’s, still and silent, with yellow and shadow, pools of grease on the walls and floors, and white silhouettes where the lathes and machines once stood, and patches where feet stood, came and went, for night after night and year on year on year -

           or flattened rocks on a beach in North Wales, where the sea smoothes over the centuries, centuries on. It’s virtually impossible - you know it - to make any money out of writing poetry, and the writing can really make you wonder where the heart has gone to by the end. But it’s true, like any work, that “it’s the heart that you put into it that counts”. It’s true.

           The balance will all work out, in time. At the point of balance, whatever the weight, there is none.

3

(Violence)

The biggest weight, of course, was the silence: that is the whiteness of his skin, the bloodless body dumped on the eastbound line behind the train, the passengers gone, the driver walking back along the track, the policeman.

           Who could even have thought of building a place like this right next to the Edinburgh-to-Glasgow railway line? Someone said it was actually common for patients to jump right off in front of the trains - a regular life-time horror, I thought, for the drivers. But it’s true - “you can’t keep them locked in all the time”...

           The day itself was brilliant and warm, and sparrows were singing in dusty bushes along the banks. His tee-shirt had ridden up and his trousers down a bit, exposing his back and the top of his buttock. It must have been twenty minutes or so, they reckoned.

           The day was shining, a couple of people were waiting for trains: for him, the day that he just couldn’t deal with it any more, and collapsed to nothing more than his body.

           The biggest part of the morning - the nothing now but white beneath his clothes - a violence beyond description, and a silence disclosing damage.